Support this Site

Dan Moren for Macworld

A decade or so, the idea of convergence was king. Rather than having a slew of different devices like a media player and an ebook reader and a gaming console, the idea was that we’d some day have a single device capable of handling all the different tasks that we might throw at it. While the iPhone and iPad have in some ways delivered on those promises—they’re media players, Internet communicators, and so on—if anything, device proliferation has only gotten more pronounced over the last few years.

That’s why I find myself intrigued by one particular announcement from Microsoft—yes, that Microsoft—this past week. The Display Dock is a small box, probably about the size of an Apple TV, into which you plug a monitor and other peripherals, such as a mouse and keyboard. When you sit down at your desk, you dock your phone, and voilà, it becomes a computer. One device, multiple contexts. A strange idea, to be sure, but one that I think might be a harbinger of things to come.